Following the American Revolution, the new United States’ desire for more land was at the forefront of policy. Although the Indigenous peoples of North America appear much less frequently in post-Revolution historiography, they were actually at the centre of this issue. The so-called ‘empty land’ that the ‘new’ Americans coveted was historically Native American territory, meaning that the expansionist policies were ultimately dispossessing ones. Between the end of the Revolution and the Indian Removal Act of 1830, policy makers faced the challenge of placating potentially hostile Native nations, and simultaneously securing cessions of their land. In this period, the solution was to be a ‘plan for civilisation’ that would ultimately turn the occupants of United States territory into one nation. Thomas Jefferson envisioned the day when ‘‘we shall all be Americans’’ - or, when all abided by the white settler way of life.[1] Naturally, many Native American nations reacted to such ideas with hostility, resisting attempts to deprive them of their ancestral homelands, and sometimes went to war to defend their land rights. However, this was not a universal response. Some nations may have been ‘hostile’ in their attitudes, but felt forced to comply in their actions, whilst some actually worked with the US‘civilising’ efforts. Neither the Indigenous nations themselves, nor their reactions to ‘civilisation’, were monolithic.
American thinking with regards to ‘civilising’ the Native Americans grew largely from the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, which perceived human difference to be the product of environment and experience. Many white European Americans believed that as Native Americans had not experienced the benefits of ‘modern’ society, they were kept in a state of savagery. It was thus the duty of the settlers to ‘civilise’ the Indigenous populations. This enabled them to justify the pursuit of Native land: as Native Americans became more ‘civilised’, they would no longer feel compelled to hunt, which would see them selling their excess land and living as farmers on smaller plots. The United States would aid this transition to yeoman farming by providing agricultural equipment and expertise. To the United States, therefore, there was only one viable definition of civilisation, and it was diametrically opposed to traditional Native American livelihoods and structures.
However, philanthropism was not the only, or arguably even the true, motive. Robbie Franklyn Ethridge claims that the ‘hidden hand behind the plan for civilisation was United States expansion’.[2] Native Americans who held onto their ancestral homelands were obstacles to the US’s manifest destiny. The ‘civilising’ plan would surmount this by simultaneously converting Native Americans to ‘civilised’ society, while solving American land hunger. The plan also grew from the reservations of George Washington’s secretary of war, Henry Knox, with regards to using force: military action was more expensive and ‘more convenient than just’. Thus, the official rhetoric revolved around saving the Indigenous peoples from extinction in face of superior race, but the enactment would see their eventual disappearance through assimilation. Jefferson encapsulated this idea, claiming that ‘‘the ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, to become one people’’.[3] Becoming ‘one people’ would effectively eradicate Native societies - this ‘intermixing’ would eventually ensure white hegemony.
It is therefore of little surprise that many nations resisted the plan. Throughout the 1780s, the new United States was determined to treat them as a defeated people, believing that they had a right to Indigenous territory. This was because many Native Americans had allied with the now defeated Great Britain during the Revolution, and were thus treated as a vanquished foe alongside the British. Native nations were consequently faced with many treaties that demanded great tracts of land, such as the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the 1785 Treaty of Fort McIntosh, and 1789 Treaty of Fort Harmar. These were deemed to be fraudulent treaties: many Native delegates who were there refused to ratify them, and many nations were not represented at all. This caused much resentment among those who did not recognise the legality of these treaties, and many were not prepared to capitulate to their terms.
In the 1790s, resentment at the terms of such treaties, as well as the frequent encroachments of white settlers onto their territory despite the massive cessions, led to the formation of the Western Confederacy. This was a loose alliance of Native Americans of the Great Lakes region, and included Miamis, Delawares and the Six Iroquois Nations. Despite their differences, they were united in opposing incessant US expansionism. Proportionally, the Battle of the Wabash in 1791 remains the worst defeat in American military history: approximately 700 US troops out of 2,000 were killed, along with 100 women and children who were following the army.[4] There was clearly a strong atmosphere of hostility amongst these varied nations. This spirit continued throughout the early 1790s, with hundreds of Cherokee, Creek and Shawnee warriors meeting in Tennessee to consider attacking a local white town in retaliation for their settler encroachments. According to an eyewitness, they performed a war dance around and shot at an American flag, in a flagrant display of animosity towards the US.[5] The resistance culminated in the 1794 Battle of the Fallen Timbers, in which the Western Confederacy was defeated and presented with little option but to agree to the Treaty of Greenville the following year, which reiterated the terms of the 1780s treaties. Following this, former members of the Western Confederacy, including the Miami leader Little Turtle, pledged to work with the federal government. This suggests that their hostilities only ceased due to pragmatism: they had already exhausted resistance, and capitulation was their only real option. It is very likely that resentment still bubbled under the surface, despite the appearance of acceptance. Hostility could be overt, or concealed in compliance, but it certainly remained strong.
Resentment of the ever-expanding frontier did not cease as the nineteenth century began. Another major example of Native American hostility came in the form of the war of 1812, which had its roots in an 1809 resistance movement and really began in 1811. The Shawnee nation led a new alliance to push back white expansion in the Northwest, which was spearheaded by brothers Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh. Tenskwatawa, also known as the Shawnee Prophet, claimed that the white Americans were evil and created by the Great Serpent. He asserted that the Indigenous nations should reject their influence and push the whites back, possibly even back to Europe. Tecumseh, who would be the military leader, undermined white rhetoric by retorting ‘’how can we have confidence in the white people? When Jesus Christ came upon the earth, you killed him and nailed him on a cross’’.[6] This indicates that many did not trust the ‘civilising’ plan, and suspected its ulterior motives: like Jesus, Native peoples could find themselves victim to both physical and societal violence.
Despite the claims of William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana territory and later the President, that a rapidly expanding population was in desperate need of land, the Shawnees had ‘done their homework’ and scouted the land, according to Nicholas Guyatt.[7] Tecumseh asked Harrison why so much of the territory had no settler communities, stating ‘’you were placed here by Government to buy land when it was offer’d to you, but not to use persuasion and threats to obtain it’’.[8] The Shawnees and their allies launched their attack before dawn while American troops were camped in Prophetstown for negotiations. Despite their near victory and the heavy losses suffered by the US troops, the Americans eventually won this battle, as well as the broader War of 1812. Harrison set about destroying Native towns and burning crops, indiscriminately targeting towns where the Indigenous people had supported the ‘civilising’ plan. For example, he destroyed the town where Little Turtle was buried, enacting revenge on friend and foe alike. Jefferson wrote to Alexander von Humboldt that the Natives’ actions had left the US to ‘‘pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach’’.[9] Hostility from some Native Americans was so strong that it elicited a severe and indiscriminate reaction from the government, even against those who were more willing to accept the plan.
As this suggests, not all Native Americans were necessarily hostile to American ‘civilising’ efforts. Sometimes, they worked with their plans and seemed to welcome the education that they offered. For example, Benjamin Hawkins, US agent to the Creeks, encouraged parents to send their daughters to schools to be tutored in cloth making as part of the plan to boost indigenous manufacture and self-sufficiency.[10] In 1804, Gideon Blackburn, a Presbyterian missionary, founded a school for Cherokee children in southeast Tennessee. Within a year, he delighted in showing the state governor their ‘progress’: ‘‘twenty five little savages of the forest’’ now sat ‘‘neatly dressed in homespun cotton’’.[11] Their parents were clearly not altogether against them receiving a European American education. Likewise, in 1825 the Choctaw Academy was founded as a collaboration between the Choctaw nation and the federal government, to provide schooling for the Choctaw (amongst other nations) youth. Native Americans would also, on occasion, attend American colleges: the Cherokee George Morgan White Eyes attended Princeton.[12] Nevertheless, it should not be assumed that Native Americans went along with these examples of the ‘civilising’ plan with the aim to abandon their cultural heritage, as many whites hoped they would. Christina Snyder argues that at these schools, ‘students added or adapted new knowledge to their own deep intellectual traditions’.[13] Whilst they may not have been completely hostile to specific parts of the plan, they did not wish to become white people, as many whites hoped they eventually would. They might be open to new knowledge or practices but they would resist attempts to obliterate their way of life. Attitudes to the plan were therefore deeply complex and could not always be categorised into binary opposition or acceptance.
As well as working with the educational aspect of the ‘civilisation’ plan, some Native Americans were willing to go along with the agricultural and social aspects. In 1789, the Cherokees asked Washington to honour his promise to send them an agent, declaring ‘‘let there be a good man appointed, and war will never happen between us’’.[14] There was clearly an attempt at peaceful coexistence: there was perhaps a recognition that as the Americans seemed to be here to stay, strong hostility was futile. The enterprises that were encouraged by these US agents often yielded promising results, suggesting that the indigenous people were on board with the plans. Four years after Benjamin Hawkins began his residency with the Creeks, he reported that Creek women and girls had made enough cloth for 300 people to wear, and that there was sufficient surplus to barter for livestock.[15] In 1802, he reported to Congress that the Creeks were raising cattle, sheep and horses, while similar ‘progress’ could be seen amongst the Cherokees, Chickasaws and Choctaws. Native delegates themselves were making formal requests to Congress agricultural equipment and supplies, and had spent $1000 on axes and hoes, instead of on ‘‘rum and geegaws’’.[16] Similarly, the Quakers, who were heavily involved in the ‘civilisation’ plan from a missionary angle, reported that 3,000 bushels of corn had been sold by the Shawnees in 1813 as a result of their agricultural reforms.[17] As policy makers and agents had hoped, Indigenous people were taking initiative and their efforts were being rewarded by tangible results. This indicates that sometimes, the Native Americans complied with ‘civilising’ efforts, and seemed determined to make the most out of the opportunities they were being given. In his analysis of the Creeks’ reactions to the ‘civilisation’ plan, Ethridge notes that the Creek women were its strongest advocates and held Hawkins in high regard, which was mutual. Hawkins included them in councils and invited them to dinners, even supporting the idea of intermarriage, at least for a while, hoping to find a wife for himself amongst the Creeks. Not only did interest in the plan depend on the nation, but it could also be viewed differently according to groups within this nation.
In conclusion, different Native nations responded to the US’s ‘civilising’ efforts with different degrees of hostility, or on occasion, acceptance. Sometimes, they would express their grievances on the battlefield, as in the early 1790s and in the War of 1812, whilst sometimes, they would appear to put their animosity aside; whether this was because they could realistically do little else, or because they genuinely welcomed attempts to bring them ‘civilisation’, is debatable and depends on each particular circumstance. Whilst some were open to the ‘civilisation’ plan and actively engaged in its implementation, it seems that no Native American nation was fully supportive of the plan; how could they be, if at its core it meant the eradication of their sovereignty and cultural identities? They may have appreciated some cross-cultural aspects of the plan, but usually, they aimed to combine these with their own traditions and structures. Ultimately, as Colin G. Calloway writes, ‘this was their homeland, but they had no desire to become part of the new nation that was being built on it’.[18] Whether they resisted or welcomed parts of the ‘civilising’ plan, they had no intention of losing their identities.
Chantelle Lee wrote this essay while in her final year of a BA in History at Cambridge University (Sidney Sussex College). She has now graduated from Oxford University (Mansfield College) with an MSt in US History.
Title when assigned: How hostile were Native American societies to US 'civilising' efforts between 1783 and 1830?
Notes: [1] Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York, 2016), p. 144. [2] Robbie Franklyn Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and their World, 1796-1816 (Chapel Hill, 2003), p. 15. [3] Guyatt, Bind Us Apart, p. 93. [4] Podcast: Ben Franklin’s world, episode 29: Colin Calloway, ‘The Victory with No Name’, https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/029/. [5] Guyatt, Bind Us Apart, p .91. [6] Ibid., p. 105. [7] Ibid., p. 104. [8] Ibid. [9] Ibid., p. 108. [10] Ethridge, Creek Country, p. 192. [11] Ibid., p.93. [12] Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of a Nation (New York, 2018), p. 342. [13] Christina Snyder, ‘The Rise and Fall of Civilizations: Indian Intellectual Culture during the Removal Era,’ Journal of American History, Vol. 104, No. 2 (September 2017), p. 390. [14] Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington, p. 337. [15] Ethridge, Creek Country, p. 192. [16] Guyatt. Bind Us Apart, p. 92. [17] Lori J. Daggar, ‘The Mission Complex: Economic Development, ‘Civilization’ and Empire in the Early Republic’, Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Fall 2016), p. 480. [18] Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington, p. 325.